IN THE last general election part of Labour’s appeal lay in its programme which, as it reached millions of voters, began to shape a new consensus — mostly working class but with support across wide sections of opinion. 

Jeremy Corbyn’s emergence from a pack of identikit New Labour politicians was already an established fact. 

The emergence of this kind of political personality into the mainstream gave a human dimension to the policy narrative. 

It was the combined appeal of a programme that articulated carefully crafted appeals to sectional interest — bound together with anti-war and anti-austerity sentiment — which changed the electoral prospects of Labour. 

The party entered the election 20 points behind and finished up level pegging.

In truth it was a fairly modest programme. And this fact illustrates the problems that all socialist and social democratic parties face in developed capitalist countries. 

How can reforming parties like present-day Labour move from a strong electoral pitch aimed at mobilising its widening constituency around a programme of limited policies towards a more sustained assault on the wealth and power of the ruling class? 

Labour pitched its policy in modest terms: an energy price cap; 100,000 low-rent houses; more free childcare and better maternity leave; scrapping university tuition fees; more investment in education; an end to zero-hours contracts and measures to tackle air pollution.

Labour’s full manifesto was both detailed and developed, but the headline messaging was simple and straightforward: for the many not the few.

Some of its elements could be accepted by a Tory government in certain conditions. For example, the Tories first excoriated and then adopted an energy price cap; in the postwar period Labour and Conservatives competed over who would build more council houses; it was Thatcher who abolished most grammar schools; it was the Tories who nationalised steel.

At each point a government representing capitalist continuity (we can include New Labour in this category) needs to maintain a basis of popular support and will bend to popular will. 

Some measures — such as steel nationalisation to stabilise supplies to industry, or a better educated labour force to meet industry’s needs — were in the wider interests of capital as a whole as well as being good things in themselves.

In fact, each of these measures — indeed all of them — could be conceded by the ruling class and, if the alternative was the prospect of an irreversible shift in power and wealth, they would. 

But a tactical retreat by our rulers is always temporary and never a surrender. Rather it is always about buying time and regrouping. 

A good illustration of this is the way the Tories conceded to the miners after a series of successful pay strikes. They then built up coal stocks at power stations, cultivated some groups of miners, bulked up the police reserves, developed alternative energy supplies and prepared for the confrontation that was to come. 

Some coup attempts, either parliamentary like the series mounted to oust Corbyn or the more serious kind, like the repeated bids in Venezuela to depose first Hugo Chavez and now Nicolas Maduro, are always preceded by mini-coups to test the waters.

Historical experience tells us that in extremis any capitalist class — either acting through its political representatives or as employers — will sacrifice present-day profits to keep the power they exercise through ownership and influence. 

Good examples are the concessions won by French workers during the Popular Front before the war, the similar situation in 1968 when Charles de Gaulle cut working hours and raised the minimum wage and, just recently, Emmanuel Macron’s partial climbdown when confronted by the gilets jaunes insurgency.

Let us speculate what might happen as a left-led Labour government begins to implement a programme which realised its slogan, for the many not the few.

We can see from the present-day media offensive against Corbyn and Labour that it will draw a reaction from not only the sections of capital directly affected by any particular measure, but also from the propertied classes as a whole. 

Inevitably the contest that then arises operates at a multiplicity of levels. We can see a situation where, in the workplaces where a changed balance of power — buttressed by the kind of labour law changes that Labour has pledged — would feed an energised trade union movement and result in a rise in workplace militancy. 

Employers will threaten, and use, investment strikes, forced redundancies, layoffs and any opportunity to play on sectional differences to divert such a movement and create a crisis atmosphere.

In Chile in 1972 — with the left-wing Allende government in office and powerful measures to nationalise US-owned mineral assets in progress — trucker owner drivers strangled road distribution while food shortages were engineered to undermine support for the government. 

In 2000 owner drivers and the haulage companies plus farmers blockaded motorways and refineries to put pressure on the Labour government’s response to rising global energy prices and EU convergence on taxation. We can see how this gives energy monopolies leverage. 

A secret memo written in 1970 by the CIA’s deputy director of plans said: “It is firm and continuing policy that Allende be overthrown by a coup … It is imperative that these actions be implemented clandestinely and securely so that the United States government and American hand be well hidden.” 

US president Richard Nixon ordered the CIA to “make the economy scream” in order to “prevent Allende from coming to power or to unseat him.”

The coup in which Allende died led to the Pinochet dictatorship and a carnival of reaction, of mass privation and a privatised economy which served as the model for Thatcherism.

With road, rail and air transport and food distribution in the hands of big monopolies we can imagine how such a crisis situation could be engineered in Britain. 

And we already know how intimate are the connections between the US security state and its British counterparts.

Part of our problem lies in the fact that the machinery of class power in Britain is bound up with membership of an interlocking system of security and military alliances, EU membership and integration into a globalised and financialised world economy.

The prospect of a breach with any of these structures of power and dominance will inevitably galvanise resistance to a Labour government’s plans. 

Labour’s present economic strategy sets out to create more jobs, with a staged return to public ownership of public services and transport along with infrastructure investment and public procurement policies and a firm tax regime. 

Its latest election broadcast makes explicit the ways in which putting more money in the pockets of working people stimulates demand.

Such an interventionist or dirigiste economic policy might well attract support from some sections of domestic capital and might even neutralise them for a while even though they may be strongly opposed to higher wages (at least in their individual enterprises) or expanded employment rights. These people would be very unreliable allies.

But there is a very wide consensus that Britain’s failing privatised and financialised economy needs to be tackled with some urgency. This must entail decisive and very wide-ranging government action: to reskill the labour force, develop the productive economy, stimulate housebuilding, tackle pressing environmental problems and climate change and strengthen the “social wage” of social care, childcare, health and public housing.

The flip side of this prospectus is an energetic governmental drive to control financial speculation, direct capital into productive investment and crack down on tax evasion and avoidance.

Something along these lines was tried out in the 1980s when Francois Mitterrand won the French presidency and a left wing majority of a revived socialist party, the French Communist Party and the Radicals was elected to the French National Assembly on a Common Programme.

Its nationalisation programme was necessary to rescue French industry from stagnation and underinvestment. Its social programme, a reinforcement of workers’ rights and a whole raft of welfare reforms, was designed to stabilise its political support. 

Mitterrand was always an unlikely revolutionary but it was economic pressures that blew his government off course. 

The big picture was a general downturn in the capitalist economies, the specific French dimension was the pressure exerted by US and German deflationary measures over which France had little influence. 

Tied into the European Monetary System — the “snake” which subsequently did for Norman Lamont — and thus unable to resist with any success the pressures which were brought to bear on the franc Mitterrand abandoned the Common Programme amid a series of devaluations and eventually deflation.

This was followed by cuts in public spending, wage limits and tax rises on working people and lower taxes on business.

From this election victory the French people gained enormous advances — most especially in the social wage, welfare, health and job security measures. These have taken decades to reverse and the scale of the ruling-class offensive has called forth the latest insurgency.

In the final analysis the working-class movement, the socialist left and the Communists were unable to checkmate the institutional right: the Ministry of Finance and top Civil Service, the big business lobby and the circles tied to French capital’s partnership with German capital and embodied in what was to become the European Union.

French capital refused to invest and, indeed, preferred to export its capital. The mobilisation of working-class militancy necessary for a thoroughgoing strategy to counter the growing crisis was more terrifying for the reformist wing of French socialism than capitulation. 

The first voice to call for a slowdown in the implementation of the Common Programme was the finance minister Jaques Delors. 

We came to know him as the European Union commissioner who sweet-talked the leadership of Britain’s trade union and labour movement into social partnership and the abandonment of its long-standing opposition to the Euro-federalist project.

We live with the consequences of this retreat today in the many ways in which membership of the EU has increasingly framed the operation of our privatised and financialised economy while the “social chapter” that Brother Delors promised appears increasingly intangible.